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Jun 15, 2006 - Commentary: Mobile Phones, a Technology Looking for a Pedagogy. Received for publication, June ... Victoria 3010, Australia. Cell phones are ... phones, games, and blogs as elements of contemporary society with potential ...
© 2006 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Printed in U.S.A.

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MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EDUCATION Vol. 34, No. 5, p. 390, 2006

Multimedia in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education Commentary: Mobile Phones, a Technology Looking for a Pedagogy Received for publication, June 15, 2006 Graham R. Parslow‡ From the Russel Grimwade School of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia

Cell phones are ubiquitous, integrated into the activities of our students, capable of multimedia presentations, and ignored by almost all lecturers. My only acknowledgment of their role is that I present a PowerPoint slide at the beginning of a lecture series asking that cell phones be kept off during lectures. This nuisance factor seems to dominate web discussion of cell phones by school teachers as judged by web searches for commentary on cell phone applications in education. For example, J. Fallon says, “In my particular case at this point, the use of cell phones is prohibited in my school and my district. Penalty for infractions range anywhere from warnings to after school detentions to confiscation of the phones.” [1] One of the names that I located in web searches is that of Steve Burt, who claims that “There’s no doubt that one of the next revolutions in classroom technology will occur right in your pocket — the cell phone that you and many if not most of your students pack around with them. I think the real change will occur as more and more of the typical services that we rely on in the current Web-based format are ported over to be cell phone accessible. One of the best examples I know of is the Google SMS1 service — www.google.com/ sms. If you are not familiar with SMS (Small Message Service), you might know it by its more common name, text messaging. The upshot with Google SMS is that it allows you to send a text message to Google to answer some pretty interesting queries. Google claims you’ll get your result back in a minute or so — and I’ve found it really works.” [2] This means that when a lecturer uses a new term, a student can obtain the meaning by the use of a mobile phone. However, I talked to students who suggested that it was much better to ask the lecturer at the time because surely a number of students would be ignorant of the meaning and would be better served by conventional interaction. In June 2006, the conference of the UK Association of Colleges included discussion groups that looked at mobile phones, games, and blogs as elements of contemporary society with potential educational value [3]. The links from this site give a good starting point to literature addressing the new technologies, but my impression remains that there are no examples of serious use in mainstream universities. The interest seems to be greatest for students ‡ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]. 1 The abbreviation used is: SMS, Small Message Service.

with low literacy or numeracy in nonconventional learning situations, such as the students of the major M-learning project that started in 2001 involving the UK, Italy, and Sweden [4]. This project has a proven record of success, and they now invite interested parties to contact them to adapt mobile learning to target situations. For the present, there remains the have and have-not divide of cell phone ownership. This seems to be rapidly disappearing as even students in developing countries commonly have cell phones. Relating to this matter of penetration of ownership, the impetus to make this commentary came from Dr. Diki, a lecturer at Universitas Terbuka Open University in Indonesia, who emailed the following to me. “I have read your paper titled Virtual Universities Are Not About to Replace Face-to-Face Teaching [5]. I agree with you, considering that in my experience, students need many face-to-face explanation and tutorials, not to mention the difficulty in learning laboratory skill. However, I recently try [sic] to establish an SMS tutorial to overcome, at least partially, the learning difficulty of students.” Dr. Diki then asked if I had experience using SMS in teaching, and I had not. I commented that I had reservations that SMS was instilling bad habits of grammar and spelling among students because of the nature of the medium. Although SMS may lead to aspects of the newspeak invented by George Orwell for his novel 1984 [6], it may be that the long term benefits far outweigh the costs as students acquire life time learning skills by using cell phones. The future will be created by our students, and they will need skills beyond those encompassed in traditional educational values. Our teaching should be heedful of the well known exclamation by French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807–1874), “Ah well! I am their leader, I really ought to follow them!” [7]. REFERENCES [1] J. Fallon (2004) Ed-Tech Insider www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2004/ 12/000401.php. [2] S. Burt (2004) Simple Cell Phone Edu-Skills www.eschoolnews.com/ eti/2004/12/000401.php. [3] R. Ghurbhurun, Chair. National Debate Two: Education or Entertainment? conference.aocnilta.co.uk/2006/05/05/entertainment. [4] J. Attewell (2006) The M-learning Project Learning and Skills Development Agency www.m-learning.org. [5] G. Parslow (2005) Virtual Universities Are Not About to Replace Faceto-Face Teaching Biochem. Mol. Biol. Educ. 33, 141. [6] G. Orwell (1949) 1984 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., London. [7] Quotations on Leadership www.nwlink.com/⬃donclark/leader/leadqot.html.

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